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Laura L. Mielke
Despite a long list of extant early American plays and scholarship on them, the drama remains a neglected genre in survey and topics courses in early American literature. The exception, of course, has been Royall Tyler’s 1787 The Contrast, a work included in the Norton and Heath anthologies. Despite the classroom neglect, theater historians have developed a rich body of superb scholarship on early American drama and a burgeoning number of literary critics have turned to the form, finding that reading in the archive of early America theater leads one inexorably to cultural practices not bound to the stage and profoundly enriches our literary history of America.
In that spirit, this chapter approaches the early American drama as inseparable from performance practices outside of, and in some cases even hostile to, proper theatrical venues and assumes that non‐theatrical performances played a critical role in the development of the dramatic genre in early America. After an introduction to the theatrical scene of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, subsequent sections take up a particular demographic in early America – Native Americans, African Americans, reforming women, and patriot combatants – and connect that group’s non‐theatrical performances to selected works of drama. It does not move in a strictly chronological manner but seeks to emphasize the rich intersections of cultures and performances across the decades this volume treats.
Of particular importance to this essay is the work of Joseph Roach (1996) and Diana Taylor (2003), both of whom approach performance as a critical form of cultural transmission and both of whom expand our focus from the original 13 colonies to sites across the Americas and around the Atlantic rim. Through what Taylor identifies as key “scenarios” (2003: 16) and Roach as “genealogies of performance” (1996: 25), communities convey “cultural memory,” as Taylor’s title indicates, not captured in the material record alone. Yet what performance communicates is far from stable: acts of performance, including reception, necessarily entail change through processes of forgetting, invention, combination, waste, and substitution. Further, what Taylor refers to as the “repertoire” of performance cannot be untangled from the “archive” of material records, for “writing and embodied performance have often worked together to layer the historical memories that constitute community” (35). Early American drama arose within performance cultures, and dramatic texts and performance cultures, historical and ongoing, are mutually illuminating. Early American drama offers the reader (and performer, dramaturge, audience, modern adapter, etc.) insight into the formal theatrical practice of the period. At the same time, it provides partial but potent access to the fleeting everyday actions of early Americans.
The Theater in Early America
Anti‐theatricality had deep roots among the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania, among other communities; however, as Odai Johnson (2006) insists, the record of legal challenges to theatrical productions in colonial America, which begins in 1665 Virginia, testifies to the persistent desire for the theater both as entertainment and as a signifier of cultural refinement. Between 1750 and 1774, even as Boston officially outlawed theatrical performance, “a permanent theatre culture,” consisting of playhouses, regularly touring theatrical companies, and audience demand, developed (Johnson 2006: 17), and by the 1790s, troupes and venues had been firmly established in “nearly every coastal city of size, as well as many smaller towns” (Richards 2005: 1). Theater audiences varied widely depending on region, but in general consisted of “gentry mixed with working class” and refrained from the rioting seen in London venues (Johnson and Burling 2001: 87). In an evening at the theater, they viewed a mainpiece and one or more afterpieces, often bridged by musical, oratorical, or comic interludes (Johnson and Burling 2001: 62). Transported to the colonial or early national theater from today, we would be struck by the dominance of London dramas and the popularity of London companies. The most popular plays in eighteenth‐century colonial America included Romeo and Juliet, The Beaux’ Stratagem, Richard III (adapted by Colley Cibber), and The Beggar’s Opera (Johnson and Burling 2001: 64). What Jeffrey H. Richards calls “the un‐Americanness of the American theatre” must shape any reading of the homegrown dramas that began to appear more regularly after the Revolution (2005: 5).
If the theater was largely authorized and conducted by Euro‐American men and touring Brits, it nonetheless involved the labor and spectatorship of other populations on the periphery of colonial power. Faye Dudden describes women in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America finding comparatively lucrative work in theater companies, which they joined with husbands and in which they often raised children (1994: 11–14). Of course, their familial roles did not disperse the “moral cloud” that hung over a woman inclined to public performance and improper submission to the male gaze (21–23). In a similar fashion, African Americans, free and enslaved, contributed to theatrical culture as carpenters, craftspeople, body servants, and audience members. African American thespians occupied a particularly precarious position, as their performance in public venues could be viewed by whites as threatening; this is illustrated in particular by the forceful resistance William Brown’s theatrical venues and acting company faced in the early 1820s (McAllister 2003: 131–166). Non‐Native fascination with Native Americans resulted not only in the proliferation of Indian characters in the drama (discussed below), but also in highly publicized appearances of Native Americans as performers and audience members in urban theatrical venues.
Who inhabited the playhouse mattered, for as theater historians of early America are increasingly emphasizing, theatrical attendance was, in many ways, parallel to such civic acts as reading the newspaper, going to the polls, or participating in a political parade. To go to the theater in eighteenth‐century London, Charleston, Philadelphia, or Kingston was to participate in the formation of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2014) terms the “performative commons,” “a location at which the provisional community of the colony [and later the nation] gather[ed] and constitute[d] itself through performance, citation, and erasure” (133). Colonialism’s “new dispensations of political freedom” and “shadow economy of dispossession” were made manifest at the playhouse through “a theatrics of erasure” (8) whereby the subjugation of African American and Native American peoples was delimited and displaced. Peter P. Reed (2009) focuses in particular on how the performance practices of racial and economic underclasses in the Atlantic world (including the laboring, the enslaved, and the criminal) contributed to the development of a ubiquitous “theatrical low” (3). John Gay’s wildly popular and regularly updated The Beggar’s Opera (1728) serves as the touchstone for Reed’s study, which finds in what he calls “rogue performances” ironically attractive social critique (7). The work of Reed and Dillon signals not only a rejection of previous emphasis on the print public sphere in the eighteenth century, but also the ongoing enlargement of critical focus beyond the emergence of a nationally distinctive theater. Their work, like that of Roach (1996) and Taylor (2003), reminds us that within theatrical spaces (architectural, performative, textual), residents of early America entertained communal associations widely variant, potentially rebellious, and notoriously unstable.
Native Acts, Playing Indian, and Barker’s Indian Princess
The wide array of Native American performances in early America included religious ceremonies, hunting and farming rites, sports, dance, the presentation of wampum, orature, political negotiations, and, of course, theater. Native American performance “is as old and varied as human inhabitation on the continent,” L.G. Moses (2002) reminds us, and “illumines questions about cultural identity, about processes of cultural change, syncretism, hybridity, blending, mixture, and parallelism,” as well as “the workings of power in the relation between Indians and Europeans” (194). Native Americans, no less than the non‐Natives with whom they interacted, contributed to the performance of Indianness in the context of colonial contact; through what Joshua David Bellin and I elsewhere call Native acts, they “complicated and concretized, claimed and reclaimed, the meaning of Indianness through performance” (Mielke 2011: 17). These Native acts found their way into early American drama, though they often underwent further permutations.
The London theater exhibited representations of Indigenous Americans concomitantly with the non‐theatrical accounts of seventeenth‐century British colonization, and by the eighteenth century, stage Indians – who, to a varying extent, bore the imprint of actual white–Native interactions – came to inhabit the colonial American theater. The earliest known drama written and performed in colonial America is Le Banc de Villeneuve’s Le Pére Indien, which appeared in Louisiana in 1753 (Jones 1988: 3), and by the early nineteenth century, groundbreaking American playwrights William Dunlap, James Nelson Barker, and Mordecai Manuel Noah had all created theatrical depictions of the “noble savage.” As Philip J. Deloria (1998) famously argues, “playing Indian” has been essential to the vexed construction of US national identity from the eighteenth century through the present: “There was […] no way to conceive an American identity without Indians […] [and] no way to make a complete identity while they remained” (37). Redface theatrical performances on early American stages, like the minstrelsy of the antebellum era, signaled affiliation with the Native and violent rejection simultaneously (Deloria 1998: 3–5). So too did other forms of playing Indian, from elocutionary textbook exercises centered on noble speeches by vanquished Native American leaders to political masquerades such as the Boston Tea Party. Even as Native Americans faced displacement and violence on the part of European and Euro‐American colonizers, the stage Indian was a prominent citizen of early American theater.
The foremost US playwright of the early nineteenth century, James Nelson Barker, turned to a foundational myth in white–Native relations for the melodrama (that is, a drama with music), The Indian Princess, or, La Belle Sauvage (1808). The play debuted in Philadelphia in April 1808 and subsequently in London, making it “the first [play] by an American to premier in the United States before being performed in an English theater” (Richards 1997: 110). Indian Princess builds upon the account, in John Smith’s A Generall Historie of Virginia, New‐England, and the Summer Isles (1624), of Smith’s near execution while a prisoner of the Powhatan Indians and his rescue by the princess Pocahontas (Matoaka), who “got his head in her armes, and laid her owne vpon his to saue him from death” (49). We have good reason to consider Smith’s account of Pocahontas and the Powhatans’ actions as an exaggeration, a misinterpretation, or an outright fabrication, but it has achieved a mythic status through untold works of literature, visual arts, and film. Barker’s text represents an early codification of the Pocahontas legend and, in particular, the early national period’s determination that her affiliation with the Jamestown colonists served as a foundation for the nation. At the same time, according to Richards, it draws on a British precursor, George Colman’s drama of interracial romance in the New World, Inkle and Yarico (1787) (Richards 2005: 9). With its high and low marriage plots, comic Irish characters, cross‐dressing women, and spectacles of Indian brutality, Barker’s The Indian Princess is at once faithful to well‐established dramatic convention and reflective of the Smith–Pocahontas exchange in seventeenth‐century Virginia. The nationalistic message of the play resides in its thematic pairing of martial valor and romantic love, as seen in particular through four moments of highly theatricalized Indian performance.
The essential Indian performance of the play is, of course, the execution scene in act 2, scene 1, indicating Pocahontas’s recognition of British superiority and cementing a peace necessary to the establishment of the Jamestown colony. The captive Smith is brought to the court of Powhatan, where the villainous priest Grimosco and the visiting warrior Miami both advise the king to execute Smith, while Prince Nantaquas and Princess Pocahontas beg for his life. Powhatan determines Smith “must die” and Miami gives the order for the warriors to strike with their tomahawks after three signals (Richard 1997: 133). Drawing on Smith’s text and period notions of Native ritual, Barker heightens the dramatic tension. Music plays, and between each signal, Pocahontas pleads for Smith’s life. Upon the third signal, according to the stage directions, “the PRINCESS, shrieking, runs distractedly to the block, and presses SMITH’S head to her bosom,” shouting, “White man, thou shalt not die; or I will die with thee!” (Richards 1997: 133). The scene does not end after Pocahontas’s intervention; “POWHATAN, after some deliberation, looking on his daughter with tenderness, presents here with a string of white wampum […] the beads of peace” (Richards 1997: 134). One imagines the non‐Native audience members thrilling to the presumed authenticity of the costuming, props, and action, as well as to the spectacle of representative noble Indians’ irresistible attraction to English superiority. The grateful Smith, who will teach Nantaquas the ways of the whites, secures the affection and allegiance of young Indian royalty.
The next node of Indian performance in the play – a war song and dance – concerns the response to irredeemable Indians, or those who resist the providential rise of English colonization. Once Pocahontas falls in love with Smith’s comrade, John Rolfe, she convinces her father to break her negotiated betrothal to a visitor from the west, Miami, who responds with “the most savage rage of jealousy” (Richards 1997: 142) and declares war on the Powhatan people. The political alliance to be gained through the betrothal of Pocahontas thus shifts from pan‐Indian to Powhatan–English, signaling a critical inroad for the latter’s power in North America. The spectacle of Powhatan preparation for war in act 2, scene 3, at once exoticizes Native Americans and thrillingly harnesses their power to colonial domination. Powhatan initiates preparations through Indian eloquence familiar to non‐Native audience members – “Warriors! we will not bury [the tomahawk] till his nation is extinct” (Richards 1997: 143) – and then proudly initiates singing and dancing to Aresqui, their god of war. No less than Pocahontas’s intervention at Smith’s execution, the performance of military might (ironically) works to absorb and disperse the threat of Native American resistance.
In Generall Historie, Smith (1624) describes a “Virginia Maske” [sic] in which, as Smith and his men camped in an open field, “thirtie young women came naked out of the woods, onely covered behind and before with a few greene leaues, their bodies all painted, some of one colour, some of another,” and under the supervision of Pochantas proceeded to sing and dance a “Mascarado” for the surprised company (67). Alternately called “fiends” and “Nymphes,” the women continue their performance within their lodgings (67). Smith offers an admittedly Anglo‐ and andro‐centric account of Powhatan ceremony, and from this record of Indigenous performance, Barker spins a colonizing performance of courtship and consummation. Indian Princess does not stage the masque but places Smith’s description in the mouth of the playful Walter, who stirs the jealousy of his betrothed with his suggestive recollection of the night. He reassures her, however, of his faithfulness through a disturbing metaphor:
[…] though in this wilderness
The trees hang full of divers colour’d fruit,
From orange‐tawny to sloe‐black, egad,
They’ll hang until they rot or ere I pluck them,
While I’ve my melting, rosy, nonpareil. [Kiss.]
(Richards 1997: 146)
In a play that rests the founding of the nation on the union between white and Indian, Barker finds multiple ways to keep racial intermixture at arm’s length. In many ways, Barker has his fruit and eats it too, offering the virtuous Pocahontas as a revered “foster‐mother” of the nation (Richards 1997: 160) while simultaneously titillating his audience through spectacles of Indian savagery and a sexualized vision of English colonial domination.
The remainder of the play follows the relationship of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, along with the pairings of secondary characters, and the repercussions of Pocahontas’s alignment with the colonists. The conquered Miami and the devious Grimosco conspire to overthrow the English by convincing the impressionable Powhatan to let them massacre all the English in attendance at a banquet. Pocahontas and her maid Nima overhear the plan and run to warn the British. Pocahontas enters the banquet just in time, and Delawar and his men “seize the uplifted arms of the INDIANS,” to form a tableau of British superior strength (Richards 1997: 162). Within moments the stage is filled with couples who have, over the course of the play, reconciled their differences and committed themselves to one another. Smith blesses their unions and finds in them a prophecy of “A great, yet virtuous empire in the west!” (Richards 1997: 165). Indian Princess secures a vision of a free country protected by valiant white men who subjugate the Indigenous population through a potent combination of force and romantic love. Arising from the combination of Native acts, British authorship, European theatrical tradition, and the persistence of Native Americans on North American soil, Barker’s drama helps us discern the complex, sexually charged process by which white–Native encounter becomes national myth.
Enslavement and Resistance in Early American Theater
The institution of slavery entailed a wide range of performances that facilitated the disciplining and exchange of African and African American bodies for profit, including (but certainly not limited to) the display of the enslaved in the market, public whippings and executions, coerced performances by musicians and dancers, auctions, fugitive slave trials, and the overseer’s brutally efficient regulation of bodies. While it might at the outset seem callous to talk about auctions and whippings in the theatrical context, recognizing the inextricability of their performative and disciplinary functions helps us better understand the matrix of physical, mental, legal, social, and cultural pressure enslavers wielded. Further, it prompts us discern the imprint of “slave spectacles” (Roach 1996: 211–233) on American theater from its origins to the present.
At the same time that certain performances sustained the institution of slavery, African Americans, enslaved and free, resisted slave power through performance, including dance, music, oratory, storytelling, foodways, worship, promenading, parades, political organizing, and mutual aid societies, and in the process created an aesthetic counterpoint to rituals of enslavement. “With virtually no recourse to the realm of formal politics,” writes Douglass A. Jones, Jr. (2014), “performance and other forms of cultural production offered the most viable and, in many respects, effective means with which to forge interventions of political significance” (9). Infamously, Euro‐American performers appropriated and distorted African American dance, music, fashion, and speech through the genre of blackface minstrelsy, which reached the height of its popularity in the 1840s and 1850s. But performances of resistance no less than those of enslavement found their way into the drama and onto the theatrical stage through means other than blackface minstrelsy. In the decades before the ascendance of blackface, argues Marvin McAllister (2003), “New World Africans crafted complex, contradictory, and multilayered performances that celebrated, parodied, and even historicized Indian, African, and European others” (6–7). They did so through the rituals of daily life and acts of political protest, but also in the professional theater as playwrights, thespians, and artisans.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, performances of slavery and resistance provided abundant raw material for the English‐language drama and the theater, and in largely convoluted ways, the theater served as a key site for the consideration of slavery’s place in the British empire and the newly minted United States. British and American audiences developed through the theater variant, rival understandings of the interplay among “slavery, liberty, and polity” on either side of the Atlantic (Gibbs 2014: 11). Acknowledging the highly problematic aspects of cultivating audience sympathy with white performers in blackface, Heather Nathans (2009) takes seriously the notion that theatrical performances of slavery – including those half a century before the debut of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – had an indelible impact on spectators and played an essential role in the debate over the future of the peculiar institution. In this period, dramas by homegrown playwrights began to include enslaved characters; Nathans traces such examples as John Murdock’s The Triumphs of Love (1794) and Abraham Lindsley’s Love and Friendship (1809). The most prominent stagings of slavery, however, were popular British imports like Colman’s Inkle and Yarico, James Cobb’s Paul and Virginia (1800), and Thomas Morton’s The Slave (1816). The decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century saw the height of the abolitionist movement in Britain, culminating in the passage of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, and such British dramas reflected the political debate.
Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787) provides a useful example. It dramatizes a well‐known story of an English trader shipwrecked with his manservant in the Americas who is protected by the beautiful and noble Indian woman, Yarico, with whom he falls in love. His manservant, Trudge, falls in love with her handmaiden, Wowski, whose features, like those of her cannibalistic countrymen who pose a danger to Inkle and Trudge, are Africanized. Indeed, Colman’s description of the land and animals of the Americas blurs the line between Africa and the New World. After Inkle and Trudge are rescued, they travel together to Barbados with their Native wives. But once in Barbados, Inkle betrays Yarico by attempting to sell her into slavery so he can marry Governor Curry’s daughter, Narcissa, to whom he is betrothed. Through a series of mistaken identities, the Governor learns of Inkle’s betrayal of Yarico. He scolds, “Men, sordid wretch! dead to all sense of honour, gratitude, or humanity – I never heard of such barbarity!” (Felsenstein 1999: 225). For his part, confronted with the suffering of Yarico and the demise of his chance with Narcissa, Inkle experiences an emotional conversion: “Nature, ’gainst habit combating within me, has penetrated to my heart; a heart, I own, long callous to the feelings of sensibility; but now it bleeds – and bleeds for my poor Yarico. Oh, let me clasp her to it, while ’tis glowing, and mingle tears of love and penitence” (Felsenstein 1999: 228). The drama concludes happily with a celebration of the three unions (Inkle and Yarico, Trudge and Wowski, Narcissa and her beau) and a finale in which the chambermaid declares that all this “taking black for white” is surely unsuitable “Unless, here, some friends appear,” as evidenced by audience applause (Felsenstein 1999: 233).
The story of an Englishman who betrays his true love to the institution of slavery existed in “well over sixty discreet versions” across the eighteenth century, including the account set down by Richard Steele in a 1711 issue of The Spectator (Felsenstein 1999: 1–2). The antislavery import of Colman’s dramatic version was not lost on British audiences, despite the work’s emphasis on Yarico’s Nativeness. Inkle and Yarico drew upon such social performances as bartering the value of a human being, the sentimental exhibition of female suffering, and the impassioned, masculine delivery of antislavery speech. Yet as Nathans (2009) and Jenna M. Gibbs (2014) show, when the drama appeared in North America, Yarico’s resemblance to the noble Pocahontas and careful costuming helped to bury the relevance to slavery in the young republic. The spectacle of slavery made its way onto the late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century North American stage, but in ways that often displaced or defused the confrontation with the peculiar institution’s legal and moral footing in a country founded on the equality of men.
The Staging of Gender Relations and Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers (1794)
The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century witnessed “the elocutionary revolution,” a transformation of rhetorical practice in which the “emotional credibility of the speaker” became paramount, and “the quest for a natural language led paradoxically to a greater theatricalization of public speaking, to a new social dramaturgy, and to a performative understanding of selfhood” (Fliegelman 1993: 2). Success in the religious, legal, and political realms necessitated careful study and application of elocutionary practice, as codified in a growing number of textbooks and commentaries. For girls with access to education at female academic and seminaries, public speaking was an important part of their training and signaled the potential for increased political agency for women in the early republic (Kelley 2006). Carolyn Eastman (2009) documents the robust elocutionary education available to female students in the decades immediately following the Revolution and its curtailment beginning in the 1810s when “the discourse about women’s public roles [began] to change toward advocating exaggerated verbal modesty” (55).
For those white women nonetheless inclined to participate in the oratorical culture so prominent between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the theater remained a site of “aural inclusion” (Dudden 1994: 15). The decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century witnessed the playwriting success of Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), who was also a patriot pamphleteer and historian; Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824), author of the formative American novel Charlotte Temple (1791); Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), who penned the groundbreaking essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790); and Frances Wright (1795–1852), best known for her reform efforts on behalf of women and the enslaved. This brief catalogue gives a sense of the way in which the theater provided a select group of women an alternative means of participating in the nation’s highly performative public sphere.
Turning to Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers (1794) in particular, we find female characters exemplifying feminine agency in the midst of patriarchal oppression, namely captivity by Barbary pirates. Rowson based her drama on a contemporary crisis: Barbary pirates took captive hundreds of Americans between 1784 and 1815. (She would go on to treat the subject again in the novel Reuben and Rachel, 1798.) First performed at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on 30 June 1794, Slaves in Algiers tells the story of six American captives and one Spanish captive, as well as the Algerian women, who are subject to the power of masters, namely Muley Moloc, the Dey (or governor) of Algiers, and Ben Hassan, an English Jew who fled to Algiers and converted to Islam in order to avoid prosecution for counterfeiting. While the drama eschews explicit parallels with the case of African slavery within the United States, it provides a bold vision of woman’s amplified voice within the new republic. Indeed, Rowson was criticized by William Cobbett for the play’s liberal vision (Kritzer 1995: 10). In key moments of the play, Rowson’s female characters perform their political agency, echoing the written and spoken language of contemporary feminist rhetors like Murray. Further, their insistence on control over their marital destiny works to unite the marriage plot of the drama with a vision of women’s agency.
At the start of the drama, Hassan’s daughter, Fetnah, has been given to the overbearing Moloc and describes the ways in which she has put off his sexual advances. The American captive, Rebecca Constant, whom the merchant Ben Hassan detains with the desire that she will become his consort, has successfully “converted [Fetnah] to both republicanism and Christianity” (Nathans 2017: 145). Fetnah and Selima, one of Moloc’s consorts, make plans to escape. Meanwhile, Americans Olivia Constant and her father, unaware that their mother/wife and young brother/son are still alive and also held captive, suffer in captivity to Moloc. Moloc’s daughter Zoriana, in love with a Christian named Henry and moved by Olivia’s story, promises to help her to freedom, as Henry and Frederic are working together for her release. Little does she know Henry is Olivia’s betrothed. The plot is complicated, to be sure, with divided families and crisscrossed lovers, but the play makes clear that tyrannous captors threaten the health and happiness of noble Christian families, especially their female members, who show great virtue in their time of trial.
The depiction of non‐Christians in Slave in Algiers is far from progressive; indeed, the play links tyranny and “all non‐Christian religions” (Nathans 2017: 27). Moloc represents Islamic tyranny, and Hassan is a stereotype of Jewish acquisitiveness and deception, speaking with a forked tongue in heavy dialect. Ransom for Rebecca and six other Americans arrives, but Hassan keeps the information to himself, planning to extort more. Further, he promises to help Frederic arrange for the safe transport home of the captives while simultaneous planning to betray them for gain. Hassan receives his comeuppance at the end of the play when, attempting to escape by dressing up in Rebecca’s clothing, Sebastian mistakes him for the woman they are there to rescue and whisks him away. Hassan leaves behind the letter and bills ransoming Rebecca, her son, and others, which Rebecca subsequently finds. By the end of the drama, the tyrannous men who wish to control the bodies of their female captives are unseated but also forgiven, thanks primarily to those women. Female virtue, exemplified by the American Christian woman, conquers all evil.
Zoriana, then, embraces not only Christianity but also the feminine self‐sacrifice she finds in Olivia and subsequently Rebecca. Heartbroken to learn that Henry loves Olivia, she affirms, “I wish to be a Christian, and I will, though my heart breaks, perform a Christian’s duty” (Kritzer 1995: 70). Still, her benevolence is no match for that of Olivia. The young American determines that she must stay behind to plead for the lives of Zoriana, Henry, and her own father should they be apprehended during the attempted escape. This happens, and Olivia offers herself in marriage to Moloc if he will spare the others. Through irrepressible stage logic, Rebecca enters with the ransom just in time to avoid that appalling union. Republican mother par excellence, Rebecca trumps both younger women’s sacrifice. She claims “kinship with the afflicted” (Kritzer 1995: 90), only to learn that she is literally kin to two of the captives. When Moloc insists that Olivia keep her promise to marry him despite the existence of ransom or he will punish them all, Rebecca declares, “Then let your vengeance fall. We will die together; for never shall Olivia, a daughter of Columbia, and a Christian, tarnish her name by apostasy or live the slave of a despotic tyrant” (Kritzer 1995: 91). Luckily, news arrives right then that the entire enslaved population of Algiers is in revolt and threatening to destroy the city if the Christians are not released. With the tables turned, Sebastian proposes that Moloc and Hasan be enslaved, but Rebecca insists, “let us not throw on another’s neck the chains we scorn to wear” (Kritzer 1995: 92). In the closing moments, the Americans convince Moloc to release his prisoners and give greater freedom to his people, an act that jangles against the reality of African American slavery on North American soil.
Rowson constructs in Slaves in Algiers moments for female characters to voice their equality (as well as to cross‐dress). Fetnah has one particularly striking moment. When Frederic and Henry determine that Fetnah should remain behind because she is a woman, she fires back: “A woman! Why, so I am. But in the cause of love or friendship, a woman can face danger with as much spirit, and as little fear, as the bravest man amongst you” (Kritzer 1995: 80). The epilogue, which Rowson performed herself, begins with an affirmation of women’s social power. She imagines the women in the audience concluding from the drama that “Women were born for universal sway; / Men to adore, be silent, and obey” (Kritzer 1995: 94). Rowson does not reject this summation yet softens its tenor through a return to feminine forgiveness:
True, ladies: beauteous nature made us fair
To strew sweet roses round the bed of care […].
To raise the fallen, to pity and forgive:
This is our noblest, best prerogative.
By these, pursuing nature’s gentle plan,
We hold in silken chains the lordly tyrant man.
(Kritzer 1995: 94)
Women may have a little fire in their dispositions and beautiful sentiments on their tongues, but Rowson concludes that their power rests in traditional feminine acts of care. A closing emphasis on American freedom – the desire for the young nation to become “the acknowledged standard of the world” (Kritzer 1995: 93) – links feminine republican virtue to the extension of US influence across the Atlantic. Perhaps this soft imperialism, as well as its concern with white female agency, lies behind the play’s bracketing of the issue of slavery on US soil.
Revolutionary Performance and Dunlap’s André (1798)
The American Revolution was a political undertaking and a military event. As cultural historians have documented, it was also a performative movement consisting of orations, parades, acts of civil disobedience, declarations, and even theater. Yet the American Revolution is strongly associated with anti‐theatricality due to the Continental Congress’s banning of theatrical performances in patriot territory in 1774 and again in 1778 (Nathans 2003: 37). Further, “from the period of the Stamp Act on, in an effort to focus a still widespread antitheatrical prejudice onto Britain, the popular press had repeatedly identified Britain with the artifice, dissimulation, effeminacy, and luxury popularly associated with the theater” (Fliegelman 1993: 90). Of course, the official anti‐theatrical stance of the patriots did not prevent college students in societies or soldiers in camps from performing. George Washington famously loved theater and oversaw stagings of Cato by his soldiers. If the theater faced an existential challenge during the war and at the start of the nation, it nonetheless continued to attract enthusiasts.
Nathans (2003) documents how, in the aftermath of the Revolution, “[theater’s] supporters would have to convince people that theater could form a vital part of the new republic – that in fact a ‘republican’ theater could exist” (44). Those who promoted the theater associated it with moral‐civic instruction, and, perhaps inevitably, the theater took on partisan expression. They also wrestled with the importance of the British repertoire to American theater. Jason Shaffer (2007) concludes that the “appropriation and redeployment” of theatrical texts “helped to generate an American nationalism that used British culture against itself, invoking both the cultural affinity between the two nations and their irreconcilable differences” (7). A broad range of performance in early America, but in particular theatrical performance, reflected the nation’s uncommon formation and the populace’s ongoing struggle to settle its cultural accounts with Britain.
Perhaps the most widely known of Revolutionary War dramas, William Dunlap’s André; A Tragedy in Five Acts (1798) is a conflicted work with a conflicted history that captures the early drama’s “diminished legacy for patriotic affirmation” (Richards 2005: 139). André follows the outlines of an actual occurrence in the war. The British officer John André, returning from negotiating with Benedict Arnold for the unauthorized transfer of West Point to British control, was captured by American forces. Because he was wearing a disguise, the much‐admired André was retained, found guilty of espionage, and despite pleas from both sides, ignominiously hung. Dunlap’s play imagines André as a sympathetic young officer who acts out of duty and regrets his one dishonorable choice (donning the fatal costume); it portrays Washington as a leader who sets aside his natural sympathy and admiration for André out of a conviction that, in light of British mistreatment of American prisoners, the patriots must act in strict adherence to “the laws of war” (Richards 1997: 86). Not unlike Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, André comes off as the most compelling figure, and the play bears an attenuated yet unmistakable anti‐war message. No wonder it was not warmly received. Dunlap immediately altered a particularly troubling scene involving an American soldier’s denunciation of Washington and in 1803 published a heavily revised edition of the play titled The Glory of Columbia – Her Yeomanry!, which became a patriotic staple (Richards 2005: 125).
In André, Washington is a complex and contemplative figure who, upon first appearance, reflects on the difficulty of virtuous action in light of human frailty. He possesses, as another officer declares, “Invaluable temperance – by all / To be acquired, yet scarcely known to any” (Richards 1997: 76). In contrast, André has been betrayed by his rashness, describing his fatal donning of the disguise as an act “Against my reason, my declared opinion; / Against my conscience, and a soldier’s fame” that “Cancel’d the record of […] former good” (Richards 1997: 77, 78). Testifying to André’s goodness is the young patriot Captain Bland, who as a prisoner of war received André’s kind attentions. Bland goes so far as to consider foreswearing his country should it execute André. Bland first pleads for André’s life with the resolute Washington who, though moved, declares that so long as the British refuse to treat the American forces as anything other than unlawful combatants, André must die.
Washington’s sound military reasoning cannot persuade Bland, whose vehemence grows. The patriot officer M’Donald reprimands Bland for such selfish stubbornness:
His sacrifice now stands the only bar
Between the wanton cruelties of war,
And our much‐suffering soldiers; yet, when weigh’d
With gratitude, for that he sav’d thy life,
These things prove gossamer, and balance air: –
Perversion monstrous of man’s moral sense!
(Richards 1997: 94)
Herein lies the central message of the play: André is a compelling figure not because he is unjustly executed but because his just execution stirs deep sympathy. André dramatizes the Enlightenment tension between reason and sensibility through the demands placed on the nation’s founder. Washington is a man of feeling who shows “a commitment to the nation’s future” (Chinn 2017: 109) and “necessary rigour” (Richards 1997: 93), one that appalls Bland and gives the audience profound pause.
André targets the audience’s sentiments in order to convince them of what Bland finally realizes: that “erring passion” (Richards 1997: 105) – whether masculine or feminine – cannot trump reason. When Britain threatens to execute one of its prisoners should the Americans hang André, and that prisoner happens to be Captain Bland’s father, Mrs. Bland arrives at the camp, her younger children in tow, to convey the threat she has received. Though she fails to sway Washington (who for his part weeps as she turns to leave), Mrs. Bland nonetheless praises his resolve. Like Rowson’s Rebecca, she speaks as the republican mother, the nurturer of good young citizens who places the nation’s good above the immediate welfare of her household. André’s final noble act is to send his own plea that his life not be avenged in such a way, and Captain Bland is saved. In contrast to Mrs. Bland stands André’s British love interest, Honora, who has crossed the ocean in search of her lost beau, cannot imagine sacrificing him, and briefly shakes André’s resolve. But André must die, and Honora represents women’s unwilling sacrifices in war.
André and its reimagining as The Glory of Columbia reside at what Nathans (2003) calls “a turning point in the development of America’s early national drama” as the elite lost control over the theater in the years just prior to Thomas Jefferson’s election (150). Dunlap’s portrait of the unavoidable tragedies brought about by strict adherence to the code of war does not resolve itself into a clear‐cut celebration of Revolutionary heroics. Ironically, what audiences appear to have found so troubling in André – its depiction of fault lines among the patriots – resonated with the political tensions that were changing the political valance of all theatrical performance. Nathans argues that the increasing conflict between Federalists and Republicans, which resulted in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, only heightened the sense that privately owned theaters failed to unite audiences across partisan lines. As the specter of chattel slavery looms in Rowson’s portrait of feminine heroism and the reality of colonial violence infuses the romance of Barker’s Virginia, so war’s squandering of life diminishes all displays of heroic patriotism in Dunlap’s historical drama.
Synthesis: Tyler’s Contrast (1787)
If I began this essay with a lament that Tyler’s The Contrast is the only anthologized early American drama, I want to end this reflection on performance and theatricality in early America somewhat perversely by framing The Contrast as synecdoche for early American drama. In striking ways, Tyler’s play synthesizes the various thematic and performative threads I have pointed to in the preceding sections. This is not to say that other early American dramas, such as those discussed here, do not function similarly. But if The Contrast remains a staple of the American literary canon, we would do well to recognize the way in which it stands not only as a fascinating expression of early nationalism but also as a compelling illustration of how early American dramas and broader performance cultures interact and overlap.
The Contrast, set in New York where it debuted in 1787, draws heavily on the comedies of British playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, illustrating its moral vision through complicated and often absurd interactions among a motley set of potential lovers. Tyler’s drama was “the first full‐length comic play by an American to be performed by a professional company” and “the first hit” (Richards 1997: 4), but also remarkable was its “effort to use romantic comedy (rather than political tragedy) as a vehicle for patriotic sentiment” (Shaffer 2007: 169). The play is best summarized through character descriptions. Obsessed with what is in fashion, Charlotte is smitten with the duplicitous Billy Dimple, who for his part pursues at once three potential brides. The other two are Letitia, an impressionable but well‐off orphan, and Maria, the virtuous daughter of the profit‐obsessed Mr. Van Rough, who would like to see Maria and Dimple wed. When Charlotte’s forbearing, patriotic brother Colonel Manly comes to the city to plead for aid to his fellow veterans, he and Maria soon find themselves in love but will not act on their impulses in deference to Mr. Van Rough. Manly is accompanied by the servant Jonathan, whom Dimple’s snobbish servant Jessamy finds riotously funny. Through a series of misunderstandings and humorous revelations, Dimple is revealed to be a spendthrift cheat, Charlotte learns the errors of her ways, and Van Rough comes to bless the union of his daughter and the honorable Manly. Thus, as Sarah Chinn (2017) concludes, “Tyler is concerned with constructing and defining American civic responsibility and masculine self‐rule in both its characters and its viewers” (100).
In ways not immediately obvious but important nonetheless, The Contrast bears the marks of performances by Native Americans, African Americans, reforming women, and patriot combatants in the early republic, and these performance traces are interwoven in ways that help us better understand the construction of race, gender, nationality, and social power in and through the early American theater. When we first meet Maria in act 1, scene 2, she sits among her books, singing “Alknomook,” a popular British song from the perspective of a Native American (sometimes referred to as Cherokee) who recounts his past accomplishments in battle, the death of his son, and the demise of his people. “Alknomook” resonates with the era’s noble savage literature, including speeches and poems that appeared in elocutionary textbooks for the youth of the nation to recite. As Maria’s comments on the song make clear, during and after the Revolution the figure of the honorable yet doomed Indian – which arose from Euro‐American atrocities and Native American responses in political negotiations and in war – helped to frame the republican virtue of enduring sacrifice and familial honor. Likewise, the black other informs Jonathan’s sense of self‐worth as a white laboring man. When Jessamy refers to him as Manly’s servant, Jonathan replies, “Servant! Sir, do you take be for a neger, – I am Colonel Manly’s waiter” (Richards 1997: 25). Through whiteness and property – “my father has as good a farm as the colonel” (Richards 1997: 25) – Jonathan claims equality with his employer and superiority to African Americans, enslaved and free. As Douglas A. Jones, Jr. documents, political agitation by free African Americans in the North increased in the decades following the Revolution, especially through political parades and related orations, as whites responded in print and in person with ridicule and white working‐class agitation depended on racial distinctions (Jones 2014: 1).
The Contrast is deeply concerned with the basis for feminine virtue in the young nation, yet it eschews the public protests of feminist rhetors. One of the key contrasts it makes is between public displays of fashion by Charlotte and Letitia (in speech, dress, social calls, theater attendance, etc.) and the private cultivation of sensibility by Maria (through reading, song, conversation, etc.). The Contrast does not depict women openly challenging patriarchal authority as in Slaves in Algiers, a telling contrast in itself. Maria and Manly are willing to forego happiness in dutiful deference to Mr. Van Rough’s fatherly authority; however, their mutual resistance to the foppery that surrounds them eventuates in their union. Maria finds agency through feminine affection, and, like Rowson’s woman, “hold[s] in silken chains the lordly tyrant man” (Kritzer 1995: 94). At the same time, she asserts that “the only safe asylum a woman of delicacy can find is in the arms of a man of honour,” namely a soldier (Richards 1997: 15). Manly’s ideal status arises in particular from his unwillingness to criticize his country, even in the face of its veterans’ financial needs, and the efforts he makes on behalf of his “brother soldiers” (Richards 1997: 46). Like Washington in André, Manly displays sensibility and also the ability to govern passion through reason. His union with Maria represents a vision of marriage distinct from that Rowson offers and yet nonetheless reflective of the national dialogue concerning women’s rights and the legacy of the Revolution.
Certainly, dramas like The Contrast represent an essential part of early American literature and the evolving nationalism that informed it. However, we should also read such works by Tyler, Rowson, Warren, Barker, Dunlap, and others for the window they provide into the living and breathing theatrical culture essential to the period’s urban scene, and increasingly to life in the hinterlands. And as I have contended, in an echo of Diana Taylor, the archive of early American drama is bound up in the repertoire of the early American people, even those without access to the literal theater house. Perhaps most importantly, then, we should read early American drama for the rich histories of how residents of the land that came to be called the United States contended for recognition and rights in voice and body.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 3 (settlement literatures before and beyond the stories of nations); chapter 7 (africans in early america); chapter 16 (captivity recast); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods).